Saint Augustine

Augustine

Agustín (Santo, Obispo de Hipona.)

St Augustine, Sai

The first new rendition for a generation of one of the classic texts of Western civilisation.

Augustine: The City of God Against the Pagans

Augustin (saint).)

Concerning Against the Pagans

The City of God

Sean Wilson

Glorious.

The most striking thing reading it this time was how buzzed Augustine was about "the present time" of the interadvental period. This isn't just a kind of "in the meantime" time, but in many ways fulfils what the psalms and the prophets foretold: the worship of demons would be driven out from the world by the city of God, and the whole world would sing a new song to the Lord.

Notwithstanding the smack talk Augustine sometimes gets for his allegory, I thought it was generally very good. He is very good at hearing things rhyme with each other, for example, that Cain the firstborn and Abel the secondborn correspond to the first "earthy" man and the second "heavenly" man of 1 Cor. 15, and in turn to the earthly and heavenly cities which set their hopes on those respective ends.

Luke Stamps

Augustine's monumental work of Christian philosophy contrasts the culture of pagan Rome with his vision of the "Heavenly Jerusalem" of scripture.

Aaron McCollough

Saint Augustine (Bishop of Hippo.)

AUGUSTINUS (A.D. 354-430), son of a pagan Patricius of Tagaste in North Africa and his Christian wife Monica, while studying in Africa to become a rhetorician, plunged into a turmoil of philosophical and psychological doubts in search of truth, joining for a time the Manichaean society. He became a teacher of grammar at Tagaste, and lived much under the influence of his mother and his friend Alypius. About 383 he went to Rome and soon after to Milan as a teacher of rhetoric, being now attracted by the philosophy of the Sceptics and of the Neo-Platonists. His studies of Pauls letters with Alypius and the preaching of Bishop Ambrose led in 386 to his rejection of all sensual habits and to his famous conversion from mixed beliefs to Christianity. After a year in Rome again and his mothers death he returned to Tagaste and there founded a religious community. In 395 or 396 he became Bishop of Hippo, and was henceforth engrossed in duties, writing and controversy. He died at Hippo during the successful siege by the Vandals. From his large output the Loeb Classical Library offers that great autobiography the Confessions which reveal Gods action in man; On the City of God which unfolds Gods action in the progress of the worlds history, and propounds the superiority of Christian beliefs over Pagan in adversity; and some of the Letters which are important for the study of ecclesiastical history and Augustines relations with other theologians.

Augustine: The City of God Against the Pagans

Reviews